her friend. But when the new-made husband and wife had been put safely
aboard the Pullman, and, with the group on the depot platform
frantically waving hats and handkerchiefs and shouting good lucks and
farewells, the train had pulled away, the loneliness in her heart had
become too great to hide. Her escort had made smart jokes about her
tears, alleging disappointment and envy. He was a poor, shallow,
witless, fool who could not understand; and that he could not
understand mattered, to her, not at all. She had commanded him to take
her home and at her front door had thanked him and sent him away.

And then it was--in the blessed privacy of her own room, with the door
locked and the shades drawn close, with her wedding finery thrown
aside and the need of self-repression no longer imperative--that, as
she sat in a low chair before the fire, she looked, for the first
time, boldly at Life and, for the first time, knew that she was a
woman--knew that womanhood was not a matter of long skirts, of hair
dressing, and the putting away of dolls.

She was tired, very tired, from the responsibilities and excitement of
the day but she did not feel that she could sleep. From the fire, she
looked up to the clock that ticked away so industriously on the
mantle. It was a little clock with a fat, golden, cupid grasping the
dial in his chubby arms as though striving to do away with time when
he might better have been busy with his bow and arrows. The hands of
the clock pointed nearly midnight. The young woman looked into the
fire again.

Already her girl friend had been a wife several hours--a wife. Already
the train was miles away bearing the newly wedded ones to their future
home--their home. The hours would go swiftly into days, the days into